Both of these guys are listed as Vice President's - Kaehler as VP Special Projects - and Bradski as VP of Advanced technology, that's no small deal.
More info of the allegations in a NY Times article (1)
(1) http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/05/27/business/ap-us-ar...
Reportedly Bradski walked away from Google right after the deal to join early Magic Leap, leaving lots of cash on the table and Google stock unvested.
The impression I get is that the only secret ML actually has is that they are years away from showing anything to validate their worth (by which point many competitors will have shown their cards and removed the 'magic' from the leap).
How is their product not rightly described as vapor ware? I feel like I've been hearing about how amazing it is for ages and still...nothing.
Stories like this aren't helping me change my mind either.
Presumably that's not the secret thing since it's directly from the Google Research Blog.
The propensity for people speaking for others trust channels is strange to me, but people still do it. Selling ones own beliefs on the coat tails of others beliefs probably isn't the best way to hard sell skepticism in a brand. That said, I'm more skeptical of Magic Leap's intent than yours, given I trust them about as far as I can throw a whale.
I applied for a job at Magic Leap. I applied for a cloud architect position, because I believe this technology is far more dangerous and insidious than we can begin to imagine. In fact, I believe it could be used to alter people's ability to perceive reality in a way that is life altering to the person wearing the device. I also think that other humans will use that altered realty to control each other.
This device should be impeccably secure, open, and transparent. The reality is that it will be full of security holes, closed source and geared toward profitability of the brands that makes them.
Augmenting one's vision without a new form of software security is going to be a really bad idea. A person in a crosswalk could be made to disappear for the occupants of a car. Drawing a gun in a man's hand could cause a police officer to shoot him.
Subject matter as disturbing as this leads to dissonance in humans, as we have a hard time understanding/simulating all the ramifications at the outset. Dissonance from that misunderstanding leads to confusion and polarization. Polarization leads to endless arguing and rationalizing. And, nothing gets done in the meantime, other than the few people running the company getting richer on all the people gobbling up their products because they think they have to have them because everyone else does too. (I rationlize this is an observation, but it's still pretty blame-y). And, the worse part is, none of them will be really thinking about how bad guys can make really bad things happen when you can change what people see with a piece of code.
As for the job, well, I found their HR process error prone, the rhetoric about the technology disingenuous, and their lack of proper scheduling worrying. Busting meetings is not a great start to hiring people, or securing advanced technology from ill doers.
Augmenting one's vision without a new form of software security is going to be a really bad idea. A person in a crosswalk could be made to disappear for the occupants of a car. Drawing a gun in a man's hand could cause a police officer to shoot him.
That is a cool scenario I've never thought through before. Interesting - thanks!contains a copy of the actual filing:
http://cdn.uploadvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/complaint...
In other words, it might not have been as hard to convince him as one might think. "Gee, I can invest a big amount in a Theranos/MagicLeap/SpaceX or I can put it into the next random/fad-ish social/pic/buzz/RailsCRUD/BigData/leadgen/TODO/PM/cloud/viral/app startup. Hmmm, choices."
I'm sure he's is not in the habit of frivously making bad investments, but a $500M investment has the financial impact to Larry Page that purchasing a computer has to the typical American. Except that that computer purchase will probably affect the money left over to pay for bills, food, rent/mortgage, sending kids to college, etc. so really the financial impact on Larry is much, much less.
If they create something that convinces the average family to shell out $800, I'll be impressed.
[1] http://qz.com/694660/looks-like-magic-leap-is-working-on-ano...
Perhaps the deep learning using robotics is simply related to this larger task, for example controlling the projecting element to account for retina movement or something similar.
I had some hope in them because I thought Google were not idiotic enough to acquire them. Now I don't trust Google as much.
http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Reality-2nd-Myron-Krueger/d...